Hello to my regulars and welcome to those who are stopping by as part of the Collected Crafty Collab Hop! If you're following the hop, you should have gotten here from the incredibly talented Boryana. At the end of this post, I'll link to the next stop!
If this is your first time checking out this hop, let me share a little background with you. Chatting with Karen, Anna, and Marie, we discovered a few things:
- We all love squirrels, but can also be just as easily distracted as the fuzzy little friends. Hence the squirrel in the logo and our affectionate name for our group, The Squirrel Girls.
- That we wanted to create a hop series to help us use the supplies we've been "squirreling" away.
- We wanted to bring more attention to blogs, still a vital part of the crafting community.
As it turns out, there are other bloggers out there just like us, giving us the chance to create a great monthly hop series! Each month, we will focus on a theme and supply type. We can decide whether we wish to use one or both. This month we could focus on Christmas, using an embellishments mousse, or both. As you no doubt guessed, I went for it and used both!
While creating a Christmas card is never a stretch for me, using mousse was. I'd ended up with some as part of a destash, so really had no idea what to do with it or how to use it. Turns out, it's not that hard! But I have no process pictures to prove this! But for a simple tutorial: I started by stamping the large sentiment in the middle with a shiny pink ink.
I will say that I accidentally did something very smart. I used a stencil in my stash that had adhesive on the back. I hadn't thought about the mousse bleeding under the stencil (as it did in a few areas toward the end), so sheer luck saved me some heartbreak! I'd been bemoaning the fact that I didn't have a spatula or anything special like that to scrape it and Karen suggested using an old credit card. She was spot on: it worked perfectly!
After that, I let it dry, then added dots of pink glitter glue as berries. Not only did it help connect the sentiment, it helped fill in some bare spots where the mousse didn't adhere fully or the stencil covering seemed insufficient. I then mounted it onto a rose gold mat on a kraft cardstock base.
I love the dimension the mousse brings to this card and I'm now thinking of all the other times a touch of dimension could spice up a scene!
Don't forget to keep hopping to see how everyone else answered this theme! Next up: Tracy!
And hey, if you like what you're seeing on the hop, please leave a comment for the participants and even consider subscribing! We all put a lot of thought and effort into this hop, so it's nice to know when it's inspiring someone!